Foo Fighters Review

*Contains offensive language*

Recently, I travelled to Milton Keynes to see on of my favourite bands live. The Foo Fighters, along with Royal Blood and Iggy Pop were absolutely amazing and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. One thing I did notice was how the language they used really got the crowd going. 

The frequent use of the words 'fucker', 'fucking' and just 'fuck' in general by all bands seemed to encourage the audience to shout and sing louder. Maybe it was the fact that the taboo that we put on words like these make it seem so much more rebellious and crazy when they are spoken. All bands used swear words quite a lot, despite the fact that they knew kids were watching. But, this behaviour is what we expect from these kind of rock bands, and in some way it's what we love about them.

Overall, I really did enjoy this experience of seeing 3 amazing artists all in one night, despite the fact that Dave Grohl was stuck on his 'throne' all night, he did manage to pull off a sensational performance in which I would love to experience again.

Word of Mouth - The Top 20 Words in English by Michael Rosen

This radio show by Michael Rosen revolves around the most common words used in the English language today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06z2pmp

Joined by Dr Laura Wright, linguist at Cambridge University, they speak about the issue. From the conversation, it is gathered that the most common words used are: the, be, to, of, and, with, I, you and have. It is clear that there are no nouns included, and few verbs. 

They are later joined by Jonathan Culpeper from the University of Lancaster. It is apparent that we don't even realise that we say the most commonly used words, because it is programmed in our brains so much that we don't have to think about it any more. Another important point discussed is that the inbuilt sexism of language is shown with the word counts of lexis in English. 'He' is the 16th most commonly used, 'His' is 23rd and 'She' is only 30th in the list. This underlines the fact that sexism is even present in the language we use. 

Another point discussed is that we have grammatical words and content words in our language. Grammatical words are the small and useful words which act as a glue to how we form sentences. Whereas content words are the ones which have meanings. They talk about the fact that 'Google' won't even pay attention to the grammatical words, just the content words.

Jonathan speaks about the word frequency units that he counted for pop songs. The most popular grammatical words were 'I', 'me' and 'my' whereas the content words were 'love', 'make', 'baby', 'alone', 'rain' and 'sad'. This implies that artists are very ego-centric and also speak a lot about romance. 

One of the final topics they talk about is how technology allows us to make words frequency lists (like the lists above.) The ever growing world that we live in is developing and so this means that we can make statistical comparisons between the language used for different purposes. This means that we can track social attitudes, much like a lot of companies do nowadays. 

Word of Mouth - Slang by Michael Rosen

This radio show by Michael Rosen revolves around the use of slang from the past to the present day. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06wd268

He is joined by Dr Laura Wright, a linguist at the University of Cambridge to talk about this type of language. Some important points discussed included the fact that 'everyone uses slang to an extent' even though we may not realise it. It is language that has been around for generations and so greatly impacts how we speak. Michael even said that 'great' used to be a slang word in the 1960's when he was 14. His parents avoided saying it, by using 'super' instead.

They were later joined by Jonathon Green, a lexicographer of slang who wrote a short introduction on the issue. He explains some of his theories starting with the theory of 'slang' is a counter language, reversing the standard English that we use in every day life. He explains that a lot of people associate slang with 'bad' people, however slang originates from the 'correct English' and is misunderstood. 

Michael, Laura and Jonathon discuss the opinion that white working class men generated the English Language. However, many different classes, genders and ethnicities are influencing the language we use today. The overall agenda from the radio talk is that creating and using slang is a very innovative and clever way of speaking, and has no relation to the intelligence of the person. Slang is not something that only certain people use, everyone contributes to the ever changing development of our language.

Mind Your Language

http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language

This page on the guardian is all about language use. It includes articles styled by The Guardian editors all about 'language usage and abusage.'

Eight words that reveal the sexism at the heart of the English Language

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/eight-words-sexism-heart-english-language

This article written by David Shariatmada states the opinion that the English language is sexist. Over the years, certain words have completely changed their meanings because of attitudes towards women and how they are seen in the society we live in. 

The Oxford dictionary is also discussed and how even the publisher is criticised for being sexist bias. In the book, its purpose is to show how words are used in the real world, and one certain example has caused an issue. 'Nagging' is followed by 'wife', being a word that relates to it in every day life. The OUP (Oxford University Press) stated that this was not an intentionally sexist action, but said 'The example sentences we use are taken from a huge variety of different sources and do not represent the views or opinions of Oxford University Press.'

From the 8 words that have completely changed meaning since when they were first used, here are some examples: 

• 'Madam' used to be the female version of 'sir' but now means 'a conceited or precocious girl or young woman; a hussy, a minx.'
• 'Wench' used to mean a young girl or unmarried woman, but now means 'a wanton woman; a mistress.'
• 'Tart' used to mean 'sweetheart' in the 19th century, whereas now it means 'a female or immoral character; a prostitute.'